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October 5, 2005Benefits of Business Blogging
I thought it would be useful to give a quick overview to the benefits of blogging.
Customers are using the web to find vendors and compare opinions with their fellow customers. A starting point for any customer’s vendor research process today for business-to-business customers is a search engine. 63% of B2B buyers start their research process with search. (Source: Marketing Sherpa Survey / Enquiro: How B-to-B Buyers Use Search, October 2004).
The best location on a search engine for a company to be is the organic results area; a recent study indicated that 62% of Internet users click through on the organic section of the Google search engine. (Source: Marketing Sherpa Survey / Enquiro: How B-to-B Buyers Use Search, October 2004)
We know therefore that search engine marketing is important, and also that the ROI on organic is higher than pay per click campaigns. To achieve a high ranking in the organic section of a search engine, a website must have three things;
1) Relevant content - contains the keywords your audience uses,
2) Votes - or backlinks from other websites
3) Accessibility - making sure your site can be indexed by a search engine
Blogs are important to search because of the way blogs are designed and implemented, blogs can help a company to achieve great results for all three of these factors.
1) Blogs are powered by content management systems that allow non-technical people to update content quickly. Also, culturally it’s very acceptable to post content more frequently than a normal website.
2) Bloggers link to other valuable content on a regular basis; if your content is valuable to other bloggers you will receive a lot of links without having to ask for the link. It's been difficult to get another website to link to a website by simply asking a Webmaster to link a site, blogs have solved that problem
3) Blogs are designed well for accessibility
The ROI from blogs for any company is therefore both the search engine marketing results in terms of higher rankings, and the public relations benefits from getting your message to your audience, by developing valuable content that is very relevant to your audience.
Developing content that interests your audience, will get a company the most attention and links from their audience. Content strategies that have worked for other companies includes; new product ideas, product feedback, and discussions about industry trends. Such content or thought leadership can improve your recognition in the community and improve lead generation.
The question for any company therefore is; which audience should your company target, and what content strategies should you develop to get the most recognition and leads from each audience?
Posted by johncass at October 5, 2005 4:42 PM
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